In my previous article about the virus attack or shall I say the torrent attack, I got multiple requests regarding what should be considered to find the best torrents and not being attacked by a virus. I have been through this and ever since I developed a few set of rules for every torrent that I downloaded and I did find the best torrents to download ever since, here are those 5 rules:

1. The most important thing is to check the date when the torrent was added, make sure that the torrent is at least 5 days old, because if it is a virus it may takes up to 3 days for it to be discovered as a virus and cleaned from the system.
2. Read the comments, and do not fall for it if there are as less as 3 comments. Usually if it is a virus, the person who made it can add 3 comments from different accounts just to make people believe in it. People usually tell in comments about the torrent, for example they’ll tell you if it is a virus.
3. The ratio between seeders and leechers is a very important aspect. Make sure that the ratio of seeders to leechers is somewhere around 5 : 4 or something similar to that. In case 1 if there are a lot more seeders than leechers then you can consider yourself to be wasting time to set it to downloading as you would not get any downloading speed, in Case 2 if there are five time more seeders than the leechers, then there is something fishy as hackers know how to easily fake the seeders count, if you’re not very good in mathematical ratios then check the Seeder Leecher Ratio Calculator and enter either the seeder or leecher of a torrent and it will tell you the suitable amount of the other one.
4. Use a good torrent site and always search for the same torrent in all of them as it will help you find the best one, I recommend the torrent sites listed below as they are the most reliable ones, although the first is  the most recommended but the rest torrent search engines are not that bad either:
   1. btjunkie
   2. Pirate Bay
   3. Mini Nova
5. Download torrents from famous users. Anonymous users usually put torrents of malicious softwares, for example if you want to download latest English movies you should search for the movies by aXXo or KLAXXON. It is best not to download torrents from guest and anonymous users.

I follow these 5 steps and have found the right torrents ever since, and this not only finds the right torrent but also protects you from virus torrents, and trust me you don’t want to be attacked by one!

It is a well-known fact that 9/10th of your downloading while browsing is of pictures and the bigger their size is the more bandwidth will be used for both the Client and the Server. Recently I checked out Ken’s Blog where he showed the fruit of his 17 years of hard work in building a Lamborghini Countach following a life-long dream. Now a story like this would grab heaps of Spikey traffic to the website in minutes, and it actually did. It did so to such an extent that the extra traffic cost him $957 because of a limited bandwidth account for which he normally paid $8.

Now, others may take out various reasons for this overage bill, but I’d give just two reasons:

1. The hosting package had a pretty low bandwidth transfer, i.e. 300 GB per month.
2. Most images on the website are not optimized and are more than 1 MB per image(Approximately)

The front page has three of these pictures which means any visitor to the front page would have to simply download more than 3.2 MB to see the Home Page, despite the fact that for such interesting content people always view other pages. A dial-up user with a speed of 56K would have to wait 9 Minutes to view the home page. Whereas, if the same pictures were optimized more than 1.5 MB per visitor could be saved. Now probably Ken and people like him do not know how to optimize a picture, so know I’ll show you how to optimize a picture for use on a website/blog, you just can’t put a picture that you just took from your camera on the website. I’ll be using a picture from Ken’s home page for this.

It is very simple, but you need to have Adobe Photoshop for this which is a professional software used for editing and making new pictures and graphics. Once you have opened it, press Ctrl+O and select the picture you want to optimize. Once the picture is opened go to File > Save For Web or press Alt+Shift+Ctrl+S, then you shall be able to get to the screen below and click on the picture below to know what to do next:

A simple test on one of his images, below are 2 links the first to the original image, and the second to the same image which was optimized by me, the difference is of 1.13 MB which is a lot:

1. Original Image ( Size = 1362KBs)
2. Optimized Image ( Size = 122KBs )

View both images, and decide for yourself if you can spot any difference between the two, as there wasn’t even a reduction in the size. It is not only for Ken but some other bloggers also upload their picutres in raw state, so it is better that you follow these easy steps and save your bandwidth. So do yourself and your reader a favor.

*This information and image from Ken’s blog was taken on 7th November and current display may differ.

I think that my blog is in the  majority of the websites on the internet which gets the least number of traffic from search engines, I am not too concerned about the rest except for Google. My daily average usually ranges between 5 - 6 visits from Google (Organic visitors). I believe that it is one of these reasons that my blog did so bad in the google:

1. Not a very high Page Rank (Like 5 or 6)
2. Not much links to specific articles to gain Google’s attention
3. Not a very old domain, google usually finds interests in old folks
4. Some XHTML not nested properly because of some specific widgets

But despite these drawbacks, I think that I have finally got it. On 20th October I wrote an article titled ‘Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Vs iPhone 3G ‘. The first day went past, so did the second and after 5 days on 26th October Google realised “Oh yeah, we almost forgot this article”, and then comes my article into the view. Don’t get too excited I didn’t get thousands of visitors, but at least I learned something. So far from 26th Oct. to 3rd Nov. I have received 70 visitors from Search Engines (All being from Google). Out of these 70 Visits, 62 were for that single article with the top search terms like the following:

1. “nokia 5800″
2. nokia 5800 vs iphone
3. nokia 5800 vs iphone 3g
4. iphone 3g vs nokia 5800

So that means if it wasn’t for this article, this blog would have only received 8 visits in 9 days, pathetic isn’t it? But now I also know why this article got so much exposure on Google. All I did was get 2-3 link backs in an extremely easy way which I did not even know of before I recalled it and that article showed up like this in Google:

The point being that if you get a few trackbacks to an article consider yourself on the road of success. If I can get 68 visits after being at 15th position out of no where, next time knowingly I can get even better results from Google. Next I will also tell you how to easily get a few link backs to any article.